--On Wednesday, 07 November, 2012 12:10 +0000 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > My experience is that, when the disclosure is made by a > corporate IPR department on behalf of the actual contributor, > there can be at least a couple of months delay. If a draft is > at an early stage in the IETF process, that isn't usually > catastrophic, but it is a bit uncomfortable. > > I wonder whether we should encourage an informal warning that > an IPR disclosure is in the pipeline, when such a corporate > delay is likely. > > On the other hand, there is sometimes the happy outcome that > the corporate IPR people decide that the contribution does not > infringe the essential claims, so no disclosure is needed. I think it would be hard to write rules here for reasons that include the contrast above (and again note this is about the rules, not about the NOTE WELL text). But it would be perfectly consistent with today's rules for a participant to post a disclosure that says "I think there may be an issue here, clarifying corporate statement will follow". That wouldn't stop the "timely" clock because it doesn't contain any substantive information that could be evaluated. I guess that, if I were personally responsible for being sure that a timely disclosure occurred and expected some months of delay, I'd consider such a note to be a professional thing to do, especially since the BCPs are (deliberately) vague and open-ended about exactly what a disclosure has to contain. A WG seeing such a placeholder notice would presumably do absolutely nothing other than remembering to ping the individual and company if things got close to a critical decisions point without any real information being available. I can agree with "encourage", but I don't think any of this requires extra text or rules. best, john